We present a study of the optimum polarization states of the pump and signal beams in two-wave mixing ampli®cation using BaTiO3 where the main objective is to improve the performance by reduction of the beam fanning. We demonstrate numerically and experimentally that at low (less than 50) pump-to-signal ratios it is advantageous to use both pump and signal in mixed polarization states with respect to the principal plane of the crystal.Beam fanning is known to be a serious limiting factor in photorefractive twomove mixing (TWM) ampli®ers. In BaTiO 3 , by far the most popular photorefractive medium, the fanning causes the beam quality to deteriorate strongly and dramatically decreases the gain. The photorefractive beam fanning originates from the energy exchange between the incident beam and the portion of this beam scattered by the crystal defects (for example [1, chapter 4]). It involves the creation of a number of noise gratings corresponding to various angular components of the scattered light. Several techniques for reduction of the beam fanning in BaTiO 3 have been proposed and studied [2±7]. In general, they are based on erasure of the noise gratings or avoiding their e ective interaction with the pump beam. The technique of incoherent erasure using pump beam with a mixed-polarization state, proposed by He and Yeh [7], is very simple and seems to be the most universal. In this scheme, the pump beam has an ordinary polarized component, which works as incoherent erasure for the noise gratings and suppresses the pump beam fanning. It is important to note that when in TWM the pump-to-signal ratio is high (a ratio of 440 was used in [7]) the suppression of the fanning of the pump beam (only) is enough to guarantee low overall fanning. So, the above technique is perfectly suited to applications where the range of very high pump-to-signal ratios is of interest, for example coherent image ampli®cation [8]. There are, however, applications where a low pump-to-signal ratio is used. For example, when TWM is applied to a high-power laser beam clean-up, the pump-to-signal ratio is usually less than 50 [9,10]. Then, the contribution of the signal to the fanning wave also becomes signi®cant and a ects the performance of the ampli®er. Taking into account that for the TWM beam clean-up the power extraction e ciency is crucial for its applicability to practice, it appears very important to analyse the fanning suppression technique of He and Yeh [7] in the case of a strong signal and to consider how its performance can be improved in this regime.